Re: cowsay could attract copyright and trademark enforcement action

[Cees de Groot <cg@evrl.com>]

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Can I be a little bit annoying here? I dabbled a lot in IP law, and the only thing I really learned is that what lay people like us think is probably not what lawyers have to say. I think it’s perfectly fine to just do nothing therefore. If an actual lawyer gets set on this package, it is early enough to take measures like removing the package.

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On Fri, Jul 16, 2021 at 18:26, Leo Prikler <leo.prikler@student.tugraz.at> wrote:

> Am Donnerstag, den 15.07.2021, 13:06 +0200 schrieb Leo Prikler:
>> Am Mittwoch, den 14.07.2021, 09:57 -0400 schrieb Bone Baboon:
>> > [...]
>> >
>> > In this response to the pull request I submitted about the
>> > questionable files in the cowsay repository
>> > <
>> > https://github.com/tnalpgge/rank-amateur-cowsay/pull/4#issuecomment-878092487
>> > apjanke is requesting feedback.
>> >
>> > > If there are any actual IP lawyers, relevant IP owners, or
>> > > distributions who redistribute cowsay who would like to weigh in
>> > > on
>> > > this, I'd definitely like to hear what you have to say.
>> >
>> > For those who want to respond to apjanke but do not have or do not
>> > want to use a GitHub account I can link this email thread in the
>> > discussion about the pull request.
>> I am not an IP lawyer, nor do I own any of said characters, but I'd
>> like to point out that not all jurisdictions follow the US model. In
>> Germany for example, you can (in the near future/already?) not use
>> more than 160 characters of copyrighted material -- granted, the
>> cowfiles are shorter than that, but copyright law is troubling over
>> here in Europe nonetheless.
> To expand on this, the 160 characters thing is a compromise, as
> according to §51a of the UrhG the use of copyrighted material for the
> purposes of caricature or parody is legal in Germany [1]. Vader koalas
> would probably fall under this paragraph.
>
> Now one could hypothesize that this applies to other parts of the EU as
> well, but I wouldn't be too sure about that. The Austrian UrhG at
> least to my untrained eyes and substring search appears to be lacking
> such a right to parody our great mouse overlord.
>
> As others point out, it is debatable whether or not such a trademark
> can be enforced, but what we should be discussing -- and I'd be more
> than happy to be wrong on this -- is whether or not the cowfiles can be
> distributed under GPL-compatible terms/in accordance with the FSDG.
>
> Regards,
> Leo
>
> [1] https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/__51a.html

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